Speed-wise, Avast SecureLine did well in our European speed tests, with us recording over 9.83MB/s (78.64Mbit/s) in our file transfer tests to the Netherlands. Its US performance was a little below average but still decent at 3.22MB/s (25.76Mbit/s), although UK performance was a bit slower than in our last round of tests, at 6.5MB/s (52Mbit/s) via FTP and 5.8MB/s (46.4Mbit/s) for an HTTP download.

CyberGhost gives Mullvad some stiff competition in the speed department, especially for locations in North America and Europe. It does a good job protecting user anonymity, too—requiring no identifying information and using a third-party service for payment processing—albeit not to the same degree as Mullvad. Add to that CyberGhost’s unique, easy-to-use interface, good price, and streaming unblocking (although not for Netflix), and this VPN is a solid choice. (See our full review of CyberGhost.)
Hotspot Shield VPN works in most countries, but that doesn’t mean it’s always legal to use a VPN in a specific country. If you have any doubts about the legality of using a VPN in a certain country, always consult a qualified lawyer because laws can change quickly. If you’re still unsure, then it’s best to play it safe and abide by the most conservative guidelines of a country.
Identity theft occurs when thieves steal your personal information and use it to commit crimes in your name — like taking over or opening new accounts, filing tax returns in your name, or renting or buying property. A VPN can help protect against identity theft by helping protect your data. It creates an encrypted tunnel for the data you send and receive that’s out of reach of cyberthieves.
Norton WiFi Privacy performed very well in our latest round of speed tests. In the UK, we got FTP and HTTP download speeds of around 9.5MB/s (76Mb/s). Using endpoints in the Netherlands, that HTTP speed went up to 10.1MB/s (81Mbit/s). U.S. speeds were also very good, exceeding our non-VPN reference download at 5.8MB/s (46.4Mbit/s) for FTP and 4.8MB/s (38.4Mbit/s) for HTTP downloads.
While a VPN can aid privacy and anonymity, I wouldn’t recommend fomenting the next great political revolution by relying solely on a VPN. Some security experts argue that a commercial VPN is better than a free proxy such as the TOR network for political activity, but a VPN is only part of the solution. To become an internet phantom (or as close as you can realistically get to one), it takes a lot more than a $7 monthly subscription to a VPN.
We haven’t tested every single VPN product on the market because there are hundreds of them. What we did was establish affiliate relationships with a number of what we think are leading VPN services on the market for private use. We then analysed those products by performing a series of objective tests, assessed our subjective personal user experience, and reported our findings to help you make an informed decision to choose the right VPN service for you. Of course, there are other VPN products out there and you should feel free to shop around outside this site. However, on this site, all testing and findings were performed by a qualified member of our staff with a minimum of a university bachelor degree in computer science and over 10 years of experience in software development. Some of the VPN software used for testing was given free for testing purposes. Most were actually purchased. We think you will struggle to find another website out there which actually downloads and tests the different VPN software using a qualified professional.
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ProtonVPN is one of the newest VPN services, and it boasts some star-studded founding members. The company was founded at CERN, the birthplace of the internet, and grew out of the ProtonMAIL service that’s been protecting the email of activists and journalists for years. The service acts as a Swiss company and is thus free from the laws of the U.S. and the European Union. It’s also not a member of the “fourteen eyes surveillance network,” and user traffic isn’t logged and passes through privacy-friendly countries, so you needn’t worry about your true IP address being revealed.
IPVanish slows down Internet speed, but only by a very little margin. It claims to be the World’s fastest VPN, but that is arguable. It offers unlimited bandwidth. However, if you are looking for a quick support, note that IPVanish does not provide such. On the support page there is a note that states that a backlog of up to a day and a half might occur. If you are a business that relies heavily on Internet, that is a downside to be considered.

Not all VPN services require that you pay. There are, in fact, many excellent free VPNs. But all of the free VPNs we've tested have some kind of limitation. Some limit you to just a few simultaneous connections or devices on an account. Others restrict you to a few hundred MBs of data per day or per month. Others limit you to just a handful of servers. Still others do all of the above.

That depends. VPN use is legal in most countries, but, according to VPN provider CyberGhost, VPN use is illegal in the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, China, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. Vladimir Putin has recently banned VPN use in Russia. Also, be aware that the so-called proxy server alternative to VPNs is also illegal in many countries, which consider any form of IP spoofing to be illegal, not just those services labeled as VPN.
PPTP - PPTP has been around since the days of Windows 95. The main selling point of PPTP is that it can be simply setup on every major OS. In short, PPTP tunnels a point-to-point connection over the GRE protocol. Unfortunately, the security of the PPTP protocol has been called into question in recent years. It is still strong, but not the most secure.
We have often said that having to choose between security and convenience is a false dichotomy, but it is at least somewhat true in the case of VPN services. When a VPN is active, your web traffic is taking a more circuitous route than usual, often resulting in sluggish download and upload speeds as well as increased latency. The good news is that using a VPN probably isn't going to remind you of the dial-up days of yore.
Nevertheless, the point of a VPN is to remain private and to have your internet activity kept as private as possible. For that reason, we’re choosing Mullvad as the best overall VPN (see our full review of Mullvad). The company recently released an overhauled desktop client, and the VPN does a great job at privacy. Mullvad doesn’t ask for your email address, and you can mail your payment in cash if you want to. Like many other VPNs, Mullvad has a no-logging policy and doesn’t even collect any identifying metadata from your usage.
The main purpose of signing up with a VPN provider is to leverage complete anonymity online. Your VPN connection must look legit with zero errors. No information should leak to cybercriminals, government agencies, and local ISPs. Since WebRTC API conflicts can result in the revealing of your true location, it is essential to go for a secure option. Buffered VPN manages to meet all expectations. The test below shows no leakage of local IP address or IPv6 address!
A virtual private network (VPN) gives you online privacy and anonymity by creating a private network from a public internet connection. VPNs mask your internet protocol (IP) address so your online actions are virtually untraceable. Most important, VPN services establish secure and encrypted connections to provide greater privacy than even a secured Wi-Fi hotspot.

While it is true that companies like Google and Facebook make money off your behavior, you are not necessarily forced to use those services. If you suddenly decided to stop using Facebook, you might miss out on cute pet pics and political rants from your friends and family, but you could still live a decent, perhaps better, life. You could even choose to avoid the Google-o-sphere entirely by using the privacy conscious DuckDuckGo for your web searches, and drop the Google-backed Chrome for the nonprofit Firefox.

Obfuscation – Obfuscation is a key feature if you are using a VPN in China, schools, work networks, or anywhere that VPNs may be blocked. However, if you are not in a restricted network situation, obfuscation is generally not necessary and may impact performance. (See the best VPN for China guide for a great selection of VPNs with built-in obfuscation features.)
Developed by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Virtual LANs (VLANs) allow multiple tagged LANs to share common trunking. VLANs frequently comprise only customer-owned facilities. Whereas VPLS as described in the above section (OSI Layer 1 services) supports emulation of both point-to-point and point-to-multipoint topologies, the method discussed here extends Layer 2 technologies such as 802.1d and 802.1q LAN trunking to run over transports such as Metro Ethernet.
If you require a high level of trust on the authentication process as well as the encryption, you might consider using digital certificates instead of the standard preshared secret key that most VPNs default to. Digital certificates guarantee that the person trying to connect is who he or she says he or she is. A separate digital certificate for each end connection can be expensive; however, some VPN vendors offer authentication services that provide a bulk discount on certificates.
Using Wi-Fi on the Windows laptops, we timed how long it took to connect to websites, measured latency times (how long it took a server to respond), and recorded upload and download speeds with Ookla's Speedtest meter, both with and without the VPN activated. We also timed how long it took to download a large video file, both with and without VPN activation.
Many installations treat external VPN clients as fully trusted internal hosts. I recommend that you create a second class of VPN user that doesn't have the full privileges of a local host and that can access only the resources that a user of that type requires. Don't give these users access to printers or shares that they don't need for external work.
Hello Nathan, We are sorry for all the inconvenience you've experienced. Bunch of different factors might interfere with how VPN works: antivirus systems, firewalls, router settings, previous VPN services installed play their role just to name a few. Your mentioned behavior is uncommon, in most cases couple of mouse clicks is enough to get our apps up and running; however sometimes additional troubleshooting is required. This is why our customer support team is available 24/7, they aim to provide our clients with the best possible experience and help in any way we can. Please don't hesitate and reach out to them in case of any future issue.

Sometimes, it’s not as simple as hiding your personal data from data-hungry organizations or your ISP. Depending on where you live, censorship could play a big role when choosing to use a VPN or not. By replacing your IP address with one from another location, you can bypass even the strictest censorship and access content on the web from around the world.

Based in Switzerland and owned by the US company “Gold Frog”, VyprVPN is quite similar to Buffered. It has quickly gained momentum in the marketplace of VPN providers. The VPN offers exceptionally fast speeds, remarkable unblocking features, and huge server database. It also offers advanced technologies, like Chameleon Technology and the famous VyprDNS.
CyberGhost has been around since 2011 and has come out strongly as a supporter of "civil rights, a free society, and an uncensored Internet culture." We really liked how the company specifically showcases, on their Web site, how folks normally prevented from accessing such important services as Facebook and YouTube can bring those services into their lives via a VPN.